Yet another adsense thread... expectations?

Google for the 'Xfactor' and 'Clickbump' threads in the Warrior Forum, if you missed those, to get a good idea of one method that has been working for many people. This approach is VERY saturated now and may have lost in effectiveness somewhat due to Google algo changes, but it's a good,simple way to start - you can get a site up in under an hour and potentially earning within a few days, then build out the keepers. Not the only approach though by any means.

Well, I don't want a typical wordpress spam site, I would actually build a full site. I'm not really interested in techniques for this. I would rather try it out on my own and go from there.

So basically, I'd like to know what the average expectation could be just starting out with this? Are people doing this as their only income, or is it just a hobby type of thing?

OH, wow... I never even thought about doing that, thank you SO much for the worthwhile post and response to me.

Honestly, I have seen threads and now I'm creating my own. If you don't like it, don't comment. Anyone that comes here enough knows that you have 3 different theories in the same thread on any subject there is.

While there are many ways to do Adsense, if you want to focus on it as a business model there are essentially two different approaches: micro niche sites, and authority sites.

The micro niche model focuses on building very small sites that target very narrow long-tail keywords, such as product names/types, that are generally not too competitive. The benefits to this approach are that you can often get to Page 1 rankings without too much time or effort, however the amount of traffic and the EPC (ad payouts) are both generally very low.

The other approach is to target somewhat broader niches with somewhat 'beefier' sites. As such, it generally takes more time & effort to rank and get traffic, but in turn the potential volume and EPC's are much greater.

For various reasons, the micro niche approach is waning; recent Google updates have begun making it harder to rank as quickly or easily for EMD's (Exact Match Domain names), there are stricter 'crackdowns' on thin sites, etc.

As someone who makes the lions share of their living with Adsense, my advice would be to get a good course on 'Big Niche' Adsense authority sites, and focus on that.

For a starting point, you can look in my sig, or search for John's (Xfactor) new book.

Michael

Micro niche sites are still in but if you plan to hit this niche with a good end result I recommend you apply the following to each micro niche site you create..

• At least 3-4 posts/pages of targeted content
• SEO'd Images (rename images to main keywords/key phrases)
• Bold your main keyword/keywords at least once per page
• Link 1-2 keywords/key phrases to authority sites (wikipedia, etc.)
• Yield a privacy page (updated with google adsense terms)
• Add your adsense a month after you create the site
• Also apply something like amazon and/or clickbank targeted product/widget

Hope this helps..

Thank you guys, very helpful. I see a lot of people saying they're making $10 a day. And thats pretty cool. Even if it was $1 a day, getting quite a few sites would be helpful. I just don't want to invest too much time in it because I keep pretty busy as it is.

But lets say, I create a site with 10-15 pages. Would that do better than a 3 page site?

I have a domain, which I think I want to make it an online forum like this. Obviously not as big as WF, but something similar. I think the main site would have maybe 20-30 articles, and then a forum.

Is that something ideal, or at that point would it be better to sell banner ads?

Well, I'm not worried about ranking, honestly. I can drive traffic to a forum and informational site, and I'm sure I will rank. It isn't really about having a big site, it is something I want to do anyway, so I think I'd like to test out adsense while doing that. After maybe go for a smaller niche.

I used to run a forum, it was about 15,000 members, and I sold banner space to monetize the site. Only made about 800-1,000 a month that way though. Maybe that is more than what I should expect from adsense, or maybe do a mixture of both?

its more than likely going to take you a long time and a lot of work to get $800-$1000 from adsense.

It's a great money model, but don't think its as easy as some people like to claim.

We write all content on Wordpress blogs and some auto-blogs. Our traffic is from natural organic search traffic (no PPC).

We make between $4000-$6000 a month on average. Yes. You can make allot of money on Adsense.

We used to use PPC too, and in those days we made allot more in gross;
http://www.zulit.com/july-adsense-income.jpg

Then it went up higher;
http://www.zulit.com/adsenselatest.jpg

Now we only make 4-6K - have not done a recent screen shot, but that is over 3 different accounts.

Don't believe anyone that tells you that you can't make money with Adsense.

Its all a function of your traffic, ctr and cpc.

It sounds like you have experience with seo and generating traffic to a website.

Rather than looking at how much you should expect per day, it's probably easier to think in terms of how much you can get per 1000 page views.

In good niches, I think maybe $12-$13 is realistic per 1000 page views, but this is going to vary a lot depending on you niche and the keywords you are ranking for.

Some people here can really nail getting high CTRs (check out the sort of CTR percentages mentioned in XFactor's threads. In this case, a $13/1000 page views would be really small for these people in good niches.

So, from your experience, think of how many page views you end up expecting to get and go from there.

Also, I have never built a forum before, but I have heard that CTR can be quite low on forums. (I'm not sure of this though, as I have no experience in this area.

Hope this helps